Chamomile Tea
by WallofIllusion
Summary: She's here to make sure that he doesn't go crazy, and it's high time they admitted that to each other.


**Title**: Chamomile Tea  
**Author**: WallofIllusion  
**Fandom**: _Soul Eater_ (compatible with manga or anime canon)  
**Characters**: Marie and Stein~  
**Misc. Notes**: You get to meet some of my headcanon!  
**Disclaimer**: _Soul Eater_ belongs to Atsushi Ohkubo.

EDIT: Guh, I'm sorry about the textual glitches before. Last-minute changes were not very carefully made. Also, I've removed a careless reference to Stein staring into Marie's eye**s**. :P My deepest apologies.

* * *

Marie held his hand back until he stopped resisting her, and then she pulled the scalpel from his limp fingers. In a moment, he rolled his sleeve back down and stood. Marie caught his arm before he could get away.

"What, Marie?" he asked in a voice that would have sounded cold if it were not so obviously exhausted.

"I don't know if sitting and talking with me will help," Marie said, "but I know going off and sulking by yourself won't."

Stein sat, and Marie gave him a smile that might have been a little too bright.

"I'll make us some tea."

He said nothing. Marie ducked into the next room, which she had dubbed the kitchen because it held the most Bunsen burners. After setting some water to boil, she gave the quietest sigh she could manage.

She'd known the white lies would have to end sometime.

So far, they'd lived together peacefully without stating the reason for the arrangement. They found excuses without much effort. She'd moved in temporarily because she hadn't found an apartment yet. The situation had become semi-permanent because Death City apartments were filling up fast, what with people flocking to the one place where the Kishin would not willingly come. When Stein stared at nothing for minutes at a time, it was because he was thinking or tired; when he trembled, it was because he was cold, so Marie turned on his heater and changed into a T-shirt. Even when Lord Death had summoned her for a report and she'd gotten home late one afternoon, Stein had simply asked her what he had said about her teaching style so far. But there was no convenient excuse for why Stein had just tried to stick a scalpel into his own arm. He was going crazy. Marie was living with him, was spending as much time as possible with him, to try to stop him.

As her kettle began to whistle, Marie removed it from the ring stand and poured the water into a pair of mugs (also hers). She turned off the burner, dropped a chamomile tea bag into each mug, and took a deep breath before heading back into the other room to face Stein again.

_Be patient_, Lord Death had advised her when she'd gone to see him. _Be gentle, be positive—just be yourself for him, Marie. That'll help him more than anything else._

Stein was still sitting where she'd left him, motionless. He looked up when she put the tea in front of him.

"Thank you," he said stiffly.

There was no other chair at his computer desk, so Marie leaned on the desk itself. After a cautious sip of her tea, she said, "Are you okay, Stein?"

"Depends on your definition of 'okay.'"

"Let's start with 'not about to stab yourself.'"

Stein smirked. Strangely, Marie found this a welcome sight; when he smirked like that, he was covering his madness, which meant that, for the moment, it could be covered. "That's setting the bar low."

"But it's a very important factor in overall okay-ness," Marie pointed out.

"All right, by that definition—if by no other—I am perfectly fine right now." And his smirk slipped away as he stared into his tea. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

"Don't worry about it." Marie pulled the tea bag out of her mug, and without her asking Stein reached for a handful of scrap printouts for her to put it on. She watched the reddened water seep into the paper for a moment. "Hey, Stein… what were you thinking? What made you…" _…grin so maniacally as you swung a blade at your own arm with all your might?_

"What made me want to cut my arm open?" Stein finished her sentence in a somewhat milder manner than she'd had in mind. He took the opportunity to fish his own tea bag out, letting it drip into the mug a few times before moving it to the scrap paper. Finally he looked up at Marie. "Do you remember when I got the scar across my face? Or were you ignoring me at that point?"

It was a valid question. Their break up had been… messy. Stein had pulled her aside one day and explained that he'd spent their whole relationship mistaking an attraction to her soul wavelength for affection and that he'd never really been in love with her; she'd given him a black eye and hadn't spoken to him for several years. But that hadn't stopped her stomach from dropping the morning he'd come into class with a swollen, red line of stitches down his face. "I remember. That was when I wasn't speaking to you, but I could hardly ignore my ex-boyfriend's having a wound like that."

"Ah, so you felt vindictive."

"What? No—Stein." Marie sighed in frustration. "I was concerned."

"…Oh." Stein took a sip of his tea. "There was no need to be. It was an incision, not a wound… I used to feel like if I could find the right place to cut, I'd be able to find what was wrong with me and take it out. I knew it was ridiculous to think that, but I couldn't stop myself. And now I've been getting that feeling again. Like the madness is burrowing under my skin, and if I can just catch it—"

Marie saw his hands tremble. "Do you want to talk about something else?"

"That would probably be best."

"Your class?" she suggested.

He shrugged. "It's full of teenagers who act like teenagers, as always. There are some idiots and some serious students mixed in, but most of them are apathetic. And I continue to be mistaken for someone who should be teaching a class."

Marie chuckled. "You don't think you should be?" Stein looked at her as if the answer should have been obvious. She only smiled back. "I seem to remember that you were always a great tutor. You're very good at making complicated things easy to understand, which is rare for someone as smart as you."

Stein grunted in not-quite-agreement.

"Don't you like teaching?"

"It's not that. I like it more than I expected to." Stein reached up and cranked the screw in his head. "But do I honestly look like someone you want to entrust impressionable youths to?"

"Sure, why not?"

"I'm insane, Marie."

His flat tone of voice combined with the echoing _click_ of his screw twisting into place made her jump. He wasn't joking. Marie tried to regain her composure and sound absolutely sure of herself as she said, "Not yet, you're not."

"Yes, I am." He glared at her, defiant—almost as if he was offended that she would deny his madness. "I have been my whole life. My mind does not work correctly. I was good at hiding it for a while, but that's not going to last now that the Kishin's free. I'm a time bomb, Marie, and Lord Death is keeping me in a _classroom_."

"So," she said levelly, "obviously he thinks you're trustworthy."

"That has nothing to do with it. He doesn't have a choice. I'm needed. Someone has to teach these kids how to deal with the current state of the world, and I'm the best option for now. Who knows what he plans to do with me once I become unusable."

"That's not going to happen. It's _not_," she said over him as he tried to interrupt. "I'm not just saying that. You're not going to go crazy—"

"Completely crazy," Stein corrected.

"—Because I'm here to make sure that doesn't happen. That's why he put me with you, Stein, we both know that. And I won't let you break." She took the mug out of his hands, put it down, and then took his hands in hers. He didn't pull away, but he didn't clasp her hands back either. "Do you believe me?"

Stein looked away.

"Stein," she said, her voice wavering.

When he spoke, it was in a mutter as if he didn't even want to let the words out of his mouth. "Do you honestly think that this can be solved by _your_ effort?" Now he pulled his hands away from her, clasped them behind his head, and leaned back to look at the ceiling. "I'm already broken. You can't fix me. Your job is to slow down my deterioration in the hope that Kishin will be safely gone again before I'm beyond saving."

Marie's stomach lurched painfully, but she controlled her face in case Stein looked back at her. She could not despair. "You will never be beyond saving."

"Why?" She could hear the smirk in his voice. "Because you won't let me get that far?"

"That's right."

"You're naïve, Marie."

"_Stein_," she said. She pulled him up to face her. His eyes were cold and distant and hopeless, and the words Marie had been about to say caught in her throat. Her shoulders drooped, and rather than reassuring him she found herself asking, "Are you always thinking things like that? About how it's only a matter of time before you lose yourself?"

He stared into her face. "Constantly," he admitted.

How dark. How… lonely. Marie couldn't imagine what it would be like to feel such despair and mistrust for herself, to be forever thinking of the worst and calling it inevitable. She sent Stein a small smile, trying to encourage the same from him.

"How're you supposed to fight off the madness thinking depressing thoughts like that? You won't even want to fight if all you ever think about is how you're going to lose."

"Ha. That's certainly true." Stein did smile, but not for her; he looked as if he was remembering an inside joke of some kind. "What do you recommend, then, O great and wise Marie Mjolnir?"

"Don't make fun of me. I'll hit you," she said, half serious, half joking and hoping he'd laugh. He didn't.

"I won't if you'll stop trying to suggest that the power of positive thinking is going to turn my life around."

"I'm not saying that, Stein." Marie leaned back on the desk. "I'm just saying that you should think about the things that make your life easier instead of sitting around moping about what you can't change."

"Did you have any suggestions?" he asked, still faintly sarcastic. But the way his eyes were trained on her made her think that he was honestly listening from beyond all the defenses he put between himself and the world. She didn't have the personality or the guile to get through those defenses—but even if he hadn't loved her, she had once gotten him to venture outside of them on his own. She brandished an index finger in his face, and he raised an eyebrow at her.

"For starters," she said, "you could think of your housemate, who does nice things like make you tea and even dinner when you're working so hard you forget to eat, who is so stubborn and naïve that she's never going to give up on you."

Not a smirk, but a smile—a tiny one, but a real smile—crept onto Stein's face. "She sounds overworked."

"It's okay. She gets really absorbed in whatever she's doing, anyway, so I guess she doesn't mind."


End file.
